Art / Culture

Suddenly the lights go out in the whole town. We’re in pitch black darkness. The crowd is silent. Then with a great creaking sound, the enormous wooden doors of the cathedral slowly open.

We’re in Caravaca de la Cruz, a small town in the little known region of Murcia in southern Spain. It’s midnight and this is our first Semana Santa or Holy Week experience. Frankly, we have no idea what to expect...

Let’s face it, I’m at war with words. Every battle is important. Some people crack under the strain, like soldiers at the front. Fine print, Orwellian transpositions, heroic hyperbole of all sorts; these are a few of the tactics words use against us.

I have no respect for words, they’re spineless; they lie to us all the time. Like prostitutes, they don’t care who uses them. They’re duplicitous, and they work against our happiness—but what else do we have? What can we do? We’re besieged by words, assaulted, that’s why a writer’s task is to defend us, to hold words at bay...

On October 11, 1981, the second day of what was to have been several months of joint fieldwork in a remote region of the Philippines, Renato Rosaldo’s wife and companion anthropologist, Michelle (Shelly) Rosaldo, fell from a precarious trail to her death 60 feet below. These are the facts. Suddenly, the woman he loved was gone, their two small children motherless, their immediate and long-range future dramatically reorganized.

In The Day of Shelly’s Death (Duke University Press, 2014), Renato Rosaldo calls on his most painful memories and all his skills—as poet and social anthropologist, as husband, father and someone who sifts through time and feeling in multi-faced testament—to give us the finely woven layers of a tragic event and the people who inhabited that event...

Published at a time when many artists, if not world citizens, were trying to recover a little poetry in their war-ravaged lives, Henry Miller came out with this book about Arthur Rimbaud, the enigmatic French Symbolist poet who died in 1891 at thirty-seven. As a figure in culture, this poet and adventurer represented Henry’s life-long obsession, a book about the man who haunted him—in his psychic life and his work—and taunted him to see through the blunders of culture: to search his insides and live up to it—if he had the courage. This long essay on Rimbaud explores the depths of the great poet’s truncated life, and his even more stunted life in literature, and it’s clear Henry was always in awe of Arthur...

In the program notes for the East Mountain Center for Theatre’s terrific new production of The Gin Game at the Vista Grande Community Center, actor Tim Reardon comments that he is “of an age when there is likely more experiences behind me than in front.” The same is true of the two characters in this drama, Reardon’s Weller Martin and Georgia Athearn’s Fonsia Dorsey (as well as of this reviewer), which, as Reardon says, “brings a certain perspective"...